“Ryan's design skills are top-notch, but it's his ability to build highly-motivated, impactful, and and successful teams that really sets him apart as a leader. I was lucky enough to be on Ryan's team for over two years: during this time, I had a chance to see how deeply Ryan cared about what we were building and its impact on literally billions of people. On a more personal level, Ryan gave me the freedom I needed to explore in a new role, along with the support I needed to achieve success. Most important, Ryan cares about the people he works with and builds them up. Simply put, it's hard to find people who can lead diverse, strong, and caring teams as effectively as Ryan.”
About
Ryan Freitas is a Product Design leader from San Francisco, California. In 2021 he left…
Activity
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NYC designers and content designers: come work with Dan (and me) on Consumer Payments!
NYC designers and content designers: come work with Dan (and me) on Consumer Payments!
Shared by Ryan Freitas
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Education
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University of California, San Diego
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Activities and Societies: UCSD Fencing Team, KSDT Radio, Student Cable Works
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Patents
Languages
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German
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Japanese
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Recommendations received
5 people have recommended Ryan
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👨🏻💻 Andy Budd
GV (Google Ventures) have a long history of hiring former designers and design leaders to support their portfolio companies. Folks like Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Kate Aronowitz, Daniel Burka, Braden Kowitz, Vanessa Cho, and Tom Hulme. In my latests podcast interview, Kate Aronowitz explains why this is, and what designers bring to the table. Interestingly it's not about craft, but rather the way they see the world with a beginners mind.
4 Comments -
David Eisner
The biggest shift I have seen as a VP of Design isn't AI-generated wireframes or prototyping shortcuts. It is designers using AI to step directly into frontend coding. No more design QA. No more translating Figma into tickets. Designers polish the experience in the same medium the user actually sees and feels. This change transformed my team. Designers loved the autonomy. Engineers loved being free to work on complex backend code. Quality went up, and we shipped faster. The more I talk with design leaders, the clearer it is that this will not stay a niche skill. This is becoming part of how modern design teams work. I launched CraftAmplify to help designers build this skill properly. We focus on writing production-quality code rather than prototypes. The response has been incredible. Thank you to everyone who put in the work and started shipping real code. Watching designers push their first production PR has been the highlight of my year. Each cohort is capped at five designers to keep the experience hands-on. I checked this morning, and there is only one seat left for all of 2025, so I added new sessions for January and February 2026. Details are here: https://lnkd.in/eXqsMadG #ProductDesign #Frontend #AI #DesignEngineering #CraftAmplify
8 Comments -
Tom Greever
I’ve met with a dozen or so C-level product leaders recently and every single one of them has expressed varying levels of disappointment at how their design teams have lagged behind adopting AI tooling in the design process. They expect AI to get them faster output, higher quality, or both. All of them want their design teams to have an intentional practice around gen AI tools, but their teams seem hesitant (or even resistant). Interestingly, many also expect to hire more designers because their engineers are moving so fast now that design is a bottleneck. They know they need more designers, but want to see more AI adoption before making that investment. The irony is that hesitation around AI may be the very thing delaying design teams from getting the support and capacity they need. And until they can turn that expectation into a visible, repeatable practice, they will be perceived as a laggard on the team. In other words, AI adoption isn’t just a tooling or process decision anymore - it’s also a marker of credibility and capacity for design. The teams that close this gap will earn more trust and influence.
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